The attack was mitigated around three hours after it started. “The justice website is now back up and running. Sorry for any inconvenience the downtime caused,” the MoJ wrote on Twitter.

V3 contacted the MoJ for more information, but had received no reply at the time of publication. While the source of the incident is unclear the attack underlines the threats facing organisations of all types from DDoS attacks.

CloudFlare, the firm that mitigated the attack, did not reveal the target, but said that it could represent the start of a new era of “ugly” attacks.

The attack took advantage of the Network Time Protocol used to synchronise the time between computers online, which CloudFlare has previously warned could be easily compromised for a large-scale attack.